Letter of the Week – “I have heard this music a zillion times but it never ever once sounded like this.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Five Star Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased many years ago:

Hey Tom, 

I just listened to Bridge over Troubled Water that arrived while I was on my trip to India. It was really spectacular. I have heard this music a zillion times over the last 40 years but it never ever once sounded like this. Amazing. I have to get Bookends and PSRT also. 

John R.

John,

We love it when customers tell us that our Hot Stamper pressings are a revelation. At these prices they’d better be!

This album has been remastered many times, but as far as we know you just cannot beat the right 360 Label pressings, which is why those are mostly the ones we sell, with an occasional Red Label pressing making the grade.

We’ve auditioned many pressings of BOTW, including the Mobile Fidelity from 1984, the CBS Half-Speed from 1980, and the Classic Records Heavy Vinyl pressing from 1999.

There have been many more remastered since those three came out, but we don’t see any reason to expect them to be any better than the consistently second- and third-rate records currently being made these days, so we haven’t bothered to audition any of the newer pressings and have no plans to at this time.

If any of the labels currently making records start to make some that sound as good as the ones we sell, please let us know.

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Universal Heavy Vinyl Quadrophenia Reviewed

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Who Available Now

Sonic Grade: B

UIPDATE 2026

These are old notes from many years ago. Take them with a very large grain of salt, and don’t buy this version of the album unless it’s reasonably priced and returnable. A pressing with Hot Stampers is going to be dramatically better, and might sound as good as this pressing.

Wow! This Universal Heavy Vinyl pressing from circa 2000 (the turn of the century!) is superb, not all that far from a good Track original, and quieter for sure. 

Side One rocks incredibly hard from start to finish. What a great album. It has to rank right up there with the best rock of the ’70s, right behind Who’s Next and probably on a par with Tommy, good company indeed, since we LOVE all three of those albums here at Better Records. (Both Tommy and Who’s Next are Top 100 titles, but Quadrophenia is not far behind either of them for sound or music.

Here’s what we wrote about this pressing when it was still in print ten twenty or more years ago.

Thank you Universal! We have almost forgiven you for the Cat Stevens records you ruined. With more great releases like this one, that debacle will fade one day from memory.

Although you can still buy those crappy pressings from my competitors. Have they no shame?

As with any Who album, this is obviously not your average Audiophile Demo Disc. We don’t imagine you’ll be enjoying this one with wine, cigars, and polite conversation. This one is for turning up loud and rockin’ out — in other words, it’s our kind of record.

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Thoughts on One of the Most Dynamic Contemporary Recordings

More of the Music of Art Pepper

This commentary was written in 2008.

Intensity is right — this is some SERIOUSLY GOOD SOUNDING alto saxophone led quartet jazz. AMG was right to give this one 4 1/2 stars — the musicianship is top notch and Pepper’s playing is INSPIRED throughout. 

The real surprise was how well recorded this album from 1963 is. I can’t recall a more DYNAMIC Contemporary. Pepper’s sax gets seriously LOUD in some passages. This is very much a good thing. Not only is he totally committed to the music, but the engineers are getting that energy onto the record so that we at home can feel the moment to moment raw power of his playing.

(Pepper was famous for saying that his playing is best when he just plays whatever he feels in the moment, and this record is the best kind of evidence for the truth of that claim.)

Of course, since this is a Roy Dunann recording, all the tubey magical richness and sweetness are here as well, but what is surprising is how transparent, spacious and clear the sound is. Some of Roy’s recordings can sound a bit dead (recording in your stockroom is not always the best for spaciousness) and sometimes are a bit thick as well. Not so here. But it should be pointed out that we liked what we heard from a previous shootout too.

Last time around we wrote:

This record has superb sound: you can actually hear the keys clacking on the man’s alto. And that sort of detail does not come at the expense of phony brightness as it would with your typical audiophile recording. The tonality of the sax, drums, and bass are right on the money, exactly the way we expect Roy DuNann’s recording to be.

This time around we got more extension out of the cymbals. Either these copies are better, were cleaned better, or were helped quite a bit by our new Townshend SuperTweeters. (Probably the last two more than the first one.) (more…)

Pet Sounds on DCC Is Yet Another Mediocre Remaster

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beach Boys Available Now

Sonic Grade: C-

The no-longer-surprising thing about our Hot Stamper pressings of Pet Sounds is how completely they trounce the DCC LP. Folks, it’s really no contest. Yes, the DCC is tonally balanced and can sound decent enough, but it can’t compete with the best “mystery” pressings [1] that we sell.

It’s missing too much of the presence, intimacy, immediacy and transparency that we’ve discovered on the better Capitol pressings.

As is the case with practically every record pressed on Heavy Vinyl over the last twenty years, there is a suffocating loss of ambience throughout, a pronounced sterility to the sound.

Modern remastered records just do not BREATHE like the real thing.

Good EQ or Bad EQ, they all suffer to one degree or another from a bad case of audio enervation. Where is the life of the music?

You can turn up the volume on these remastered LPs all you want; they simply refuse to come to life.

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Welcome To the World of Hot Stampers, Where No Two Copies of an Album Sound the Same

New to the Blog? Start Here

The fundamental principle that is at the heart of understanding records is, like evolution, both a theory and a fact:

No two copies of a record sound the same.

That’s the undeniable reality of the analog LP, as well as the driving force that turned a hobby into a full-fledged livelihood for me and my staff of ten. (I have since retired and turned over the running of the business to my highly-trained, exceptionally-competent workers. They seem to like records almost as much as I still do.)

Many people find the ideas (and the prices!) on this website shocking. Frankly, they would be shocking to us too if we weren’t hearing such dramatic differences in the sound quality of the large numbers of copies we play every day.

Our staff devotes its time to finding, cleaning and playing as many pressings of an album as we can get our hands on. We take only the best sounding copies – we call them “Hot Stampers” – and make them available exclusively to those who appreciate (and can afford) the ultimate in analog sound.

What makes us unique in the world of record sellers is that we’re the only ones who base the price of their records on their sound quality. Although we’ve been finding Hot Stamper pressings for close to thirty years, it has only become the main focus of our business since the late-2000s.

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Letter of the Week – “I never thought I’d spend $600 on ‘it’s only a record.’ But it is worth every goosebump.”

More of the Music of Steely Dan

Reviews and Commentaries for Aja

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

You bastard! You did it again. GREAT pressing of AJA Steely Dan – promo album.

This is by far the best recording I’ve heard. I am a freak listener. Everything has to sound perfect, I hear everything.

I savor every note, every instrument, every vocal. The separation and presence of each sound is amazing.

Well done. I wish you continued success. I never thought I’d spend $600 and more on “it’s only a record.” But it is worth every goosebump.

Rocco

Rocco,

By far the best recording you’ve heard? That is high praise indeed!

So glad you liked the record as much as we did. We heard 600 bucks worth of sound and apparently so did you.

Goosebumps are indeed expensive, but you could spend $1,000 or $10,000 on Heavy Vinyl and not even get a single one, so, money well spent.

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Don’t Waste Your Money on this Prokofiev Symphony No. 5

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The copies we recently auditioned of LSC 2272 were crude and congested in the loudest passages. Cleaning did not seem to help. There may be better sounding copies of the album out there in record land but we are not going to spend any more time looking for them, especially considering the prices Living Stereo pressings now command on the used record market.

Please consider taking our advice and giving this one a miss.

There are quite a number of other vintage classical releases that we’ve run into over the years with shortcomings such as these.

For fans of vintage Living Stereo pressings, here are some to avoid.

Some audiophiles may be impressed by the average Shaded Dog pressing, but I can assure you that we here at Better Records are decidedly not of that persuasion.

Something in the range of five to ten per cent of the major label Golden Age recordings we play will eventually make it to the site. The vast majority just don’t sound all that good to us. (Many have second- and third-rate performances and those get tossed without ever making it to a shootout.)

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Verdi, et al. / Ballet Music From The Opera

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review was written many, many years ago, so many years ago that I don’t think I knew that the Victrola reissue had consistently better sound than any Shaded Dog we had ever played.

But one thing I did know was that the sound had obvious and rather serious shortcomings, shortcomings that the fans of vintage vinyl never seemed to notice. The conventional wisdom according to which so many record collectors and record reviewers operate, including the vast majority of those who identify as audiophiles, may have blinded them to the reality of its defects.

It’s also rare and sells on the collector market for a lot of money. Those facts often blind record lovers too.

Someone with the original in his collection might pull it off the shelf where it has been sitting for years and show such a rare and valuable and therefore impressive record to you. I suspect that such a collector would be much less likely to play it for you.

Having to sit down and actually play the records we sell means that biases and prejudices of these kinds can have no effect on our judgments. The records get played against other pressings and we simply call them as we hear them.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the original is not that good of a record.

And the best news is that the reissue is a true Demo Disc of the highest order.

Our Old Review

This copy of LSC 2400 has vintage RCA Golden Age sound, for better and for worse. Even though the album was recorded by Decca, it’s got a healthy dose of Living Stereo Tubey Magic.

There will never be a reissue of this record that even remotely captures the richness of the sound found here.  

And the hall is HUGE — so spacious and three-dimensional it’s almost shocking, especially if you’ve been playing the kind of dry, multi-miked modern recordings that the 70s ushered in for London and RCA.

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Tell It Like It Is – Another A&M Half-Speed Mastered Disaster

More of the Music of George Benson

The Half-Speed is pretty — pretty lifeless if you ask me, in the way that so many Half-Speed mastered records are.

It’s cut very clean, but until you play a good A&M pressing, you don’t know how much meat has been stripped from the bones. The best A&M pressings sound like a Rudy Van Gelder recording, which, of course, they are.

These A&M Half-Speeds suffer from all the same shortcomings that other Half-Speeds suffer from: the kind of pretty but lifeless and oh-so-boring sound that we describe in listing after listing.

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of George Benson

More Recordings Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder

Benny Carter – Additions to Further Definitions

More of the Music of Benny Carter

  • Additions to Further Definitions appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this original Impulse stereo pressing
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this stunning copy in our notes: “jumping out of the speakers”…”tubey and 3D”…”very full sax”…”present and open and relaxed”…”big and rich”
  • Both of these sides are exceptionally transparent, with superb immediacy and remarkably clarity – thanks, RVG!
  • The music comes alive on this copy, with space, size and richness that few other pressings can match

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